SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – A franchise of One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating has improved dispatching efficiencies and employee accountability through TeleNav Track, a cell phone-based GPS navigation and tracking service.

Feb 03, 2009

SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – A franchise of One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating has improved dispatching efficiencies and employee accountability through TeleNav Track, a cell phone-based GPS navigation and tracking service.

After experiencing an increase in customer demand for improved air systems, the One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating franchise in Arizona saw the potential to expand its business by optimizing its technicians’ routes. Prior to deploying TeleNav Track, franchise technicians turned in weekly paper timesheets, offering little accuracy assurance. With TeleNav’s service on GPS-enabled Nextel Direct Connect Sprint phones, all employees can now log in and out of jobs directly from their phones upon arriving and departing each job location. Because of this, the One Hour franchise estimates that it saves approximately 40 hours a week, as employees no longer have to take time to fill out manual timecards.

“As our service commitment says, if we are not on time to an appointment, the customer does not pay for the visit,” said Jessica Kelly, office manager of the One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating franchise. “Before having an effective call routing system in place, we were absorbing up to 15-20% of servicing costs. After implementing TeleNav Track, we saw an immediate improvement in meeting our customer timeframes. Today, our technicians are on time to more than 99.9% of appointments, making for happy customers and substantial savings.”

Not only is One Hour saving costs by meeting appointment times, the franchise has also eliminated the need to walk technicians through job details over the phone. With TeleNav Track, dispatchers send weekly job details to technicians directly from the Web site to the technicians’ phones. This results in an average time reduction of more than 500 hours annually. Technicians also use GPS navigation on their phones to get to each job location quickly, and if a technician is running behind, dispatchers are alerted through TeleNav Track.

“One Hour gives its customers an ‘always on time’ guarantee, so it needs to have the technology in place to ensure it can deliver on that promise,” said Sal Dhanani, co-founder and senior director of marketing at TeleNav. “TeleNav Track helps businesses get where they need to be, on time and efficiently. This helps to build stronger customer relationships, as well as increased revenues from repeat business.”